Firing of Buffalo Sabres Coach Lindy Ruff Leaves Fans Numb

The firing of the Sabres' Lindy Ruff prompted tributes like a message erected near the team’s arena.

Doug Benz for The New York Times

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

February 22, 2013

BUFFALO — The day after he was fired as coach of the Buffalo Sabres, the team he led for 16 years, Lindy Ruff drove around the suburbs here, going from doughnut shop to doughnut shop, trying to sort out his feelings. At home, he wore shorts that bore the Sabres logo. He tried to watch on television as Buffalo played the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he could not go through with it.

“I watched one period,” Ruff, eyes welling, said Friday at his first public appearance since his firing Wednesday. “I found it incredibly strange, and I had to turn it off. It was something — I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

Coaches of professional sports teams are fired all the time, but few in this win-now era have stayed long enough in one city to see their children grow up there. Fewer still spent almost their entire playing career in that same city.

Ruff, 53, has spent half his life working for the Buffalo Sabres. He was drafted by Buffalo in 1979, when he was a tough 19-year-old from Alberta who overcame a broken femur to be chosen in the second round. He went on to play 10 years for the Sabres, including three as their captain. In July 1997, four years after Ruff retired as a player, he was named the Sabres coach.

At the time of his dismissal, he was the longest-tenured N.H.L. coach, and the second-longest in a major North American professional league, after Gregg Popovich, who was hired by the San Antonio Spurs in 1996. Ruff coached 1,165 regular-season games; only one coach in N.H.L. history, Al Arbour of the Islanders, has coached more games with one team (1,500).

But Arbour and Popovich each won multiple championships, while Ruff did not win the Stanley Cup once, either as a coach or a player.

“Just going through the last 24 hours, it’s the biggest disappointment I have,” he said.

Ruff did not want to talk Friday, but said he felt he should because he had gotten so many requests. At a news conference, he still often referred to the Sabres as “we.” He thanked the four ownership groups he worked under as coach; his players and assistants over the years; and General Manager Darcy Regier, who has been in that job only slightly longer than Ruff was in his.

“I know through 16 years, probably 99 percent of the G.M.’s in the league would have whacked the coach at a certain time,” Ruff said. “We went through some tough stretches where he stayed with me and said you can get these guys through it. He’s a good friend.”

He described how Regier came to his house Wednesday afternoon to tell him he was fired.

Ruff also thanked the fans of Western New York, citing their support in 2006, when his daughter Madeleine had successful surgery to remove a mass on her brain.

“It got us through a real tough time in our lives,” he said. “It’s a place that I call home, always will call home.”

Buffalo is like a hive mind when it comes to the Sabres and the Bills, who have had eight coaches since Ruff was hired. This small city concentrates so much attention and intellectual energy on those two teams that consensus forms quickly.

The consensus that Ruff needed to go had formed well over a year ago. The Sabres have missed the playoffs four of the past six seasons and have not advanced past the first round since 2007. Calling for Ruff’s firing has long been a regular feature of local radio shows.

At the time of his dismissal, Sabres Coach Lindy Ruff was the longest-tenured N.H.L. coach.

Bruce Bennett / Getty Images

But on Thursday, radio-show callers said that even though they have long expected Ruff to be fired, the reality was “like a punch in the gut,” as one caller put it. A new consensus formed: yes, Ruff had to go, but he was a good man who gave his all for the Sabres.

Someone spelled out “Thank U Lindy” in cardboard pieces on a fence across the street from First Niagara Center, where the Sabres play.

By Friday, scores of people had signed the message with tributes of their own.

“Thanks for everything you’ve done for the team and the city,” read one.

“Thank you for years of joy and pain,” read another.

David Bellissimo, 55, watched at an Elmwood Avenue bar Thursday as the Sabres (6-11-1) lost at Toronto, 3-1, under the interim coach Ron Rolston. They looked just as bad as they had in their past several games under Ruff.

“It’s like a love-hate thing we have with Lindy,” Bellissimo said.

Summing up the city’s tortured feelings over Ruff, Bellissimo added: “It’s his fault; it’s not his fault. He should go, but we hate to see him go.”

Bellissimo is old enough to remember when a young Ruff was butt-ended in the eye by the Islanders’ volatile goalie Billy Smith during the 1980 Stanley Cup semifinals. Ruff lay face down on the ice for a moment, then sprung up, bleeding, and attacked Smith.

Ruff’s fiery side was also in evidence when he coached the Sabres to the Stanley Cup finals against the Dallas Stars in 1999, only to lose in the third overtime period of Game 6 on a controversial goal by Brett Hull. Ruff protested that the goal should not have counted because Hull had a skate in the crease and complained in vain about it long into the morning.

Two days later he led 20,000 Buffalonians at a downtown rally in a “No goal!” chant.

Ruff said he wanted to get back to coaching someday — “I miss it already,” he said — but for now all he was looking forward to was “getting my head clear.”

He described the confused emotions of the last couple of days.

“I cleaned out my office and grabbed all my notes, the game notes,” he said. “I’ve looked at all the games. I looked at chances. I looked at how we lost. It’s like I’m driving myself crazy. But when I was done I said, you know, we gave three games away. We could have been at 9-7 and in a pretty good place, and instead we’re at 6-10. I’ve said this, it falls with me.”

Ruff’s son Brian, who plays for the Buffalo Junior Sabres in the Ontario Junior A Hockey League, sent a message out on Twitter, asking for people to show his father how much the city loved him.